Normans, Northmen, and Vikings:

Clearing a Confusion

by Freyadisa

copyright 2001

Recently, we have heard some persons claim that the Normans who
invaded England were almost all Celts, Duke William included,
because this was who populated Normandy. This belief requires
a great unfamiliarity with northern history and nomenclature.

Perhaps too much so, lately it has become acceptable to refer
to the Norse of the Migration Age as Vikings. This has helped
this confusion. It might be better to revert to the less particular
and more descriptive names for these peoples: the Norse, Norsemen,
Northmen, and/or Normans.

When Hrolf Ganger made his pact with the King of the Franks,
his bargain was that he would become Christian and settle his
men and as many other Normans as wished to join him in the lands
at the mouth of the Seine as a warrior-barrier against other raiders
like himself. Certainly there were plenty of live bodies in the
country, Celtic bodies, but they were the disarmed and ineffectual
peasantry. They could not make the least resistance to any armed
force. One thing to remember: the kings and nobles liked it that
way. The Franks had spent many centuries reducing the warriorhood
of the peasantry, putting it down violently, outlawing the possession
of warrior's equipment, and draining off their best into the gens
d'armes class, the men-at-arms.

Hrolf took the baptismal name Rollo, but most of his followers
even when baptised continued to use their Norse names. Not only
did the area become known as Normandy, "land of the Northmen,"
but the names of settlements changed in the area. There were so
many Norse living in Normandy that farms, villages, and towns
became known as the likes of "Toki's town" (Toqueville).
The very names of the place lost their Celtic character. Also,
it must be noted that Hrolf's forces not only sent home for their
wives, but all their cousins and anyone else who wanted free land
and free serfs to work it in return for their fighting skill.

So the Normans of Normandy were very much still Normans, Norsemen,
though they acquired the French language for dealing with both
their peasants and their overlords. The Normans expanded greatly
in numbers, so much so that they ran out of job positions for
warriors. Thus, large numbers were available to resettle when
some sent back word from southern Italy that there were lands
and cities ripe for new overlordship, did anyone come willing
to fight and conquer.

In the meantime, other Norse had settled in northern England
in similar numbers. There area became known as the Danelaw, the
place where Danish (Norse) law rather than Saxon law was followed.
One mark of this conquest are all the places named "-thorpe"
which is a Scandinavian word for "village." A second
is the infamous Yorkshire dialect, opaque to most Englishmen even
in the latter 1800s because it was not based on English, but was
a pidgin of Norse.

Finally, the English ruling class became heavily infiltrated
with Norse blood, until finally Scandinavian kings could successfully
claim the British throne. King Canute was actually a Norwegian,
Knut. Again, names, of persons not places, prove the case. "Harald"
or "Harold" is not a Saxon name, but a Norse one. In
1066, all three of the claimants for the English throne were Norse
blood: King Harald Godwinsson, whose brother was Earl Tostig of
Norway who came in the invasion train of King Harald of Norway,
and Duke William, probably least Norse of the three because he
was the son of a tanner's daughter, but bringing a war-train of
landless Normans. Englishmen might chose to follow one or the
other, but it was all Normans, all Norse, who were actually grasping
for the crown. It was hired Norse house carls, not Saxon, who
fell in the shield-wall at Hastings, axes against the clubs and
swords of their Norman cousins.

The final out-thrust of the Norman warrior-excess was the First
Crusade. Virtually all the names of the ones who stayed, of note,
are Norman, Norse, from Norman holdings (the exception was Raymond
of Toulouse). Once again, younger sons went out to conquer new
lands and hold them. In this case, the Scandinavian expansion
had thinned so that reinforcements from home did not come in the
necessary numbers; the Turks invading the other direction were
more determined, and the religious conflicts with their subjects
were not solved. There were even major health difficulties: few
children were born to the Norman upper classes and the mortality
was high. Many lords left lone heiresses when they died, and often
no children at all. It is only in the later 1200s that we can
begin to ignore the Norman factor in the pre-national politics
of the times.

So let us try to keep our references in period, and not refer
to peoples, especially ruling classes, as if they were of a people
long-subjugated or vanished, or yet to come. Duke William's Normans
were neither Celts nor Frenchmen, any more than the Byzantine
emperor of his day was either a Roman emperor or an Ottoman sultan.